


Detained

by theonewhohums



Category: Soul Eater
Genre: Crack, F/M, Humor, Interrogation, SoMa Week, SoMa Week 2017, Walmart, i can't believe they have a walmart tag
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-17
Updated: 2017-04-17
Packaged: 2018-10-20 00:07:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,632
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10650921
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theonewhohums/pseuds/theonewhohums
Summary: Soul and Maka are interrogated by the night manager of the Death City Wal-Mart. Did they do anything wrong? Maybe. Did it involve a bet with Black Star? Definitely.Written for Day 1 of SoMa Week 2017: Confession





	Detained

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this instead of finishing my other SoMa Week prompt.....but it still counts as productivity right?

Greg doesn’t get paid enough for this job.

It was 4:00 a.m. on a Friday night and the last thing he wanted to do was more paperwork, but if he got these interrogations done and over with by morning he could go home to his wife, Linda, and their two Chihuahuas, and not have to worry about anything until the weekend was over.

Technically this wasn’t even supposed to be his job. As the night manager at the 24-hour Death City Wal-Mart he had much more important things to be doing than questioning two shoplifters, but Dennis, the security guard on duty for tonight, was sent home early with food poisoning. Greg supposed questioning delinquent teens was a little bit better than cleaning more of Dennis’s puke off the floor of cereal aisle, but only marginally.

Greg rubbed his temples while he opened the door to his office to let the first suspect inside. Dennis was the only one with keys to the small interview room they had, so this would have to do for now. He wasn’t really sure how these interviews worked, but from what he saw on tv on the cop shows he watched with Linda, it was best to interview criminals separately so they couldn’t corroborate with one another. He highly doubted the two kids sitting outside his office counted as “criminals,” but the sentiment still applied. Best not to give them a chance to change their stories.

The first was a teenage girl, average height and slim build, wearing a trench coat. That in and of itself should have screamed that something was amuck with her, but apparently the other employees did not notice anything nefarious about the girl when they came close to letting her walk out of the store with stolen goods. The other suspect looked shady as well, a white-haired boy with sharp red eyes and strange-looking teeth that made his scowl look even more menacing. Greg figured that asking the girl was probably the better option. Teenage boys were impossible to talk to regardless of how creepy-looking they were. Greg was a teenage boy once, he knew their dispositions well.

He told her to sit, and she did, smoothing out her skirt primly and resting her folded hands in her lap. She seemed like an agreeable young girl. Maybe this whole thing would go smoothly.

Greg cleared his throat and lifted a blank sheet of paper to his face, pretending to read standard interview questions that were actually locked in the real interview room.

“So, uh, what’s your name?”

* * *

“Am I required by law to tell you that?” Maka asked the man pleasantly.

The man’s kind demeanor turned perplexed. “Excuse me?”

“I just want to know if I’m lawfully obligated to tell you my name without a lawyer present.”

“A _lawyer_?”

* * *

“Soul Evans,” Soul said, sticking his pinky inside his mouth to pick idly at one of his back teeth. A little sliver of popcorn had gotten caught back there earlier today and it had been bothering him ever since.

“Listen,” the man questioning him said. His face already looked pretty red, though Soul was having a hard time figuring out why. Did his interrogation of Maka go poorly or something? “I’m not in the mood for your games tonight, okay?  We all want this to be over so just be straight with me, okay?”

“….Okay?”

“What. Is. Your. Real. Name.”

“I already _told you—”_

* * *

 

“Listen, little girl, there’s no need to get lawyers involved here. I just need to ask you a few questions as per protocol.”

“Fine. Ask me all you want. But I prefer to remain anonymous.”

A vein in the man’s temple throbbed comically. “You can’t _remain anonymous_ when you just committed a crime!”

Maka crossed her arms indignantly. “Committed a crime? What on earth did I do?”

* * *

 

Soul was smacking his hands on the man’s desk for emphasis. “My name IS SOUL! That’s my name!! It’s on my birth certificate! Why is that so hard for you to understand?”

The manager guy put his head in his hands. “I swear the next time I see Dennis I’m killing him.”

“What?”

The man looked at Soul like he hadn’t spoken. “Fine, _Soul_ , can you care to tell me about why you’re here with me right now?”

Soul scoffed and crossed his arms, leaning back in the upholstered chair he was forced to it in for this interview. “I shouldn’t even _be_ here right now.”

The night manager looked positively LIVID. “Can one of you just ANSWER THE QUESTION PROPERLY.”

Soul did not appreciate this man shouting at him when he’d been nothing but civil the entire time. He yelled right back, “I DIDN’T DO ANYTHING WRONG! I WAS PUT UP TO THIS AGAINST MY WILL. MAKA IS THE MASTERMIND HERE. BOOK _HER.”_

The man’s eyes widened somewhere near the end of Soul’s tirade, and he picked up his clipboard and pen and started furiously writing something. “ _Maka._ Finally!”

* * *

 

“Are you serious? You were trying to steal from my store! That’s against the law, kid.”

Maka rolled her eyes. “Trust me, sir, I know the law. Probably a lot better than you, I can assure you.” She was a meister, for Death’s sake. It was her job to remain firmly on the side of Good.

“Says the one who was shoplifting.”

_Wait._ Maka pauses for a moment. “Shoplifting? Is that what they said I did?”

The man blew a breath out loudly through his nose. “If you didn’t shoplift, what is it you think you’re here for?”

“We never even left the store! That would defeat the point—” Maka squints at the man’s nametag. “—Greg.”

“Listen here, missy, I won’t let you use my name if you refuse to tell me what yours is.”

Maka looked down at her watch and smiled a little. “Fine, whatever works for you.”

* * *

 

Soul was practicing his deep breathing exercises. He just wanted to go home.

“Alright, kid, now tell me what it is your friend out there coerced you into doing.”

Soul lifted his eyes to the heavens. That’s a loaded question if he ever heard one. “Where do I even start? Listen, man, I’m a good person,” he said, placing a hand over his heart. “In fact—and I know this might be hard to believe—but I’m the honest-to-God conscience of my friend group. The fact that it’s taken us this long to get detained by someone is baffling. All I want to do it stay at home on our day off from school and watch HDTV reruns with my girlfriend, but noooo, because Maka and fucking Black Star have to make a _bet_ and poor ol’ Soul gets dragged into it, yet AGAIN.”

The manager looked like he was struggling to keep up. He’s frantically writing things on his little clipboard, but Soul couldn’t be bothered to care. “Wait, who’s Black Star, another accomplice?”

Soul ignored him, because now that he’d started complaining, he couldn’t stop. “Like? Maka complains that there’s nothing fun to do in Death City anymore and Black Star’s all ‘WANNA BET?’” Soul practically shouted, making his voice sound as bro-y as possible. “And then they’re betting! They always bet and I always get caught up in it because then Maka’s all—” his voice got significantly higher and a thousand times more defiant, “—‘me and Soul can TOTALLY stay in a Wal-Mart for 24 hours without being caught’—”

The man’s eyes widen again.

“And I never asked to be involved in this, you know? Like the last thing I want to do is spend my free Friday sneaking around a capitalist wasteland for a full freaking DAY. I like sleeping! I like not having to sneak!”

* * *

 

“I never stole anything,” Maka said, her arms cross defiantly over her chest.

“Margaret from register one says that you and your crony outside were looking very suspicious over by the front of the store. She’d seen you wandering around the store idly multiple times.”

“And I deserved to be questioned for that, why?”

“Margaret also said that when she tried to kick you out, you refused to walk through the front doors.” The man looks at her pointedly. “Where the security alarms are.”

“Why would I leave the store when I haven’t made my purchase yet?”

“Because you were never PLANNED ON MAKING A PURCHASE, did you?” The night manager says, slamming his hands down on his desk. Maka is sure if it’s for emphasis or to be intimidating. She raises an eyebrow.

“Well, that’s the first thing you’ve been right about in this entire interrogation, Greg.”

* * *

 

“Wait, so you’re saying you’ve been in my store for—”

“And God, you’d be surprised how boring Wal-Mart is after like 3 hours. Like, looking at the food just pisses you off because of how hungry you are and how cheap it is compared to local grocery stores, but you’re not gonna buy any because Wal-Mart doesn’t deserve your money when it’s causing smaller stores to out of business to begin with—”

The manager jumped in. “Wal-Mart is a wholesome, family store—”

“Can it, Greg,” Soul said, not missing a beat. “And after a while you start reading all the trashy dollar novels but you can only see word ‘meat missile’ so many times before you start to think, hey, maybe these authors _aren’t_ being ironic when they write this, and then it gets kinda sad.” Soul ran his hands through his hair. “And Maka can be stuck in the book section for _ever,_ so you gotta find something else to do since trying to get her to give up this dumb bet clearly isn’t worth it.

“And so then you’re playing with Power Rangers toys in the kid’s section, which is really fun but the toy section people are looking at you _really suspiciously_ , which I don’t get, because what’s so wrong with two seventeen-year-olds playing with Power Rangers? They’re cool, okay?”

Greg over there opened his mouth like he was going to interject, but closed his mouth when Soul loudly shouted “I’M COOL, OKAY?”

* * *

 

“I knew it! You weren’t planning on buying anything!”

Maka sat stoically while the man gloated, though she was still unsure what he was so happy about. He hadn’t really gotten her to admit anything. She wiped some sweat from the back of her neck and sighed. She was already hot to begin with, but somewhere throughout this little “interrogation” Greg had turned his desk lamp around to blind her. This guy had seen too many 60’s cop shows.

“Getting a little nervous there, girl? Looks like you’re starting to sweat.”

Maka rolled her eyes.

* * *

 

“So the Power Rangers plan is over, so then you go over to the exercise equipment because your meister absolutely insists on training since we’re not at school to do it.” Soul rubs the back of his neck as he looks up at the ceiling, lost in thought. “And like, I love her, but why does she always have to do that. Even on our day off, trapped in a Wal-Mart, of all places, she still wants to do homework? Who does that? So now you’re spotting your girlfriend while she benches like 150, hoping to God she doesn’t ask you to switch because then you’re gonna have to take all the weight off of that bar, and fuck—you’re gonna have to get a LIGHTER BAR entirely, and how embarrassing is that?”

* * *

 

Part of Maka wished she was an actual shoplifter just so she could have swiped a deodorant when her and Soul were bumming around in the pharmacy department. She was starting to smell a little rank after training with Soul for two hours in the exercise department, and the damn light that man insisted on shining in her face wasn’t happening.

“Listen, sir, since I never actually stole anything, you don’t have anything to pin on me. So why don’t we just call it a night—” she glanced at her watch again, “—and let me go. My partner and I will go purchase something in the store to make you happy and we’ll be on our way.”

“No way, missy. Just because you have a smart mouth doesn’t mean I can’t get your little partner-in-crime to fess up to what you two have been doing in my store.” He stood and went to his office door, opening it up and calling for Soul. “It’s your turn, son,” he said, his voice a little deeper like he was planning on going back to the intimidation tactic. Maka sighed and stood up, walking past Soul. She tilted her wrist in just such a way that he could see the timer still going on her watch.

* * *

 

“—And after getting kicked out of the toilet paper section for building forts, what is left for you to do, really? The electronics department didn’t even _have_ HDTV as a station, so there was really no point in hanging out there once your heart is set on Flip of Flop. We were gonna go grab a cart from the front to do chariot races when that nosey cashier started yelling at us.”

The night manager looked at Soul speechlessly. He idly wondered how long he’d been talking. “So yeah, I’m beat. Can I go now?”

The man looked down at his clipboard, then up at Soul again. “So, you didn’t shoplift anything?”

He raised an eyebrow at him. “No? Why the fuck would we do that? Maka’s morals are way too strict for crap like stealing.”

Greg thumped his head on his desk.

“Are you okay, man?”

* * *

 

Greg breathed in loudly through his nose, the wood of his desk cool against his forehead.

“Listen, just go, kid.”

“What? I can’t hear you with your face all down like that.”

Greg peered up at the boy and scowled. “Just. Go.” It felt like he’d been talking to these kids for an eternity. After all that, they never even stole anything.

“I mean, if you say so,” he said with a shrug, standing up and putting a hand in his pocket. He went to the door and opened it. “Oi, Maka. The guy says we can go—” he shut the door behind him, but there wasn’t enough force for it to click all the way shut.

“Did you say anything to him?” Greg heard the girl—Maka—say quietly. “You were in there for a while.”

“Nah, not much. I mean we didn’t even technically do anything wrong, unless Wal-Mart wants to give a loitering fine or something. But I don’t think he wants to see us anymore. Were you being a pain or somethin’?”

The girl laughed a little. “Nah, not really.”

Greg squeezed his hand into a fist. He was going to need to get his blood pressure taken in the pharmacy department after this. He stood to go shut his door the rest of the way.

“Hey,” the boy asked, voice a little farther away. They must have been leaving the back hallway to head back into the store. “What time is it anyway?”

Greg peered out the door in time to see the girl thrust her wrist watch in the boy’s face delightedly.

“Time for Black Star to PAY UP!! We won the bet!”

“We better have, after I poured my guts out to that guy for like two hours,” the boy grumbled.

The girl kissed him on the cheek happily. “You’re the best partner-in-crime ever, you know that?”

They turned to walk away. “Yeah, yeah. Black Star better know that he owes ME fifty bucks and back-rub too.”

Greg shut his door with a little more force than necessary. He definitely had a story to tell Linda in the morning now.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Let's be honest, we all knew Soul would crack first.


End file.
